V. Conclusion

People live in a global marketplace that is supersaturated with digital media going 24/7, and nothing is sacred or secret. Companies literally cannot count on any asset to sustain their competitive advantage these days except for one – knowledge, and the innovation it delivers.

Human knowledge, and the social process that creates it, is the most significant source of new wealth on earth today. Three quarters of the value of all manufactured goods now derives from knowledge. Knowledge is an inexhaustible resource and its frontier is truly endless. Business has discovered that ethnography is the technology best suited to extracting knowledge from human beings, and, like a newborn infant, this reality cannot be stuffed back into its anthropological womb. The third generation speaks with a voice that is distinctive because it stands in a relation to the capitalist machine that is different from the stance of the two generations past.

These anthropologists are not naive people to the machine, either in the intellectual or technical sense. Nor are they searching desperately for legitimacy inside a brave new world. Rather, these voices are full of self-consciousness, as well as self-confidence. They know who they are, where they are, and why they are there. They practice inside business, but they do not hide their identity as anthropologists, nor do they forget that identity. Instead, they perform a feat of double practice in which they ply their craft while simultaneously observing themselves doing it.

My personal interest remains more in why anthropologists should take advertising seriously than in why advertising should take anthropology seriously. There is still a long way to go in persuading people that it is often the most familiar and ubiquitous aspects of our own society that we least understand partly because we are so much more assertive about our assumption that we do understand them. In former times the role of anthropology seemed obvious because cultural diversity as a prior condition of the world seemed obvious.

When we constantly talk about globalization and homogenization, anthropology is more important than it ever used to be since the new cultural diversity that develops from the breaking down of global institutions is not nearly so evident, and will be denied, if anthropologists fail to confront the assumptions behind general terms such as capitalism but equally education or bureaucracy.

The advertising business, like any business, encourages and rewards only the sort of critical reflection that is likely to be profitable within the terms of the enterprise, defined instrumentally. But to say that workers in the business are not rewarded for the kind of reflexivity that calls the accepted borders of the enterprise into question is not to say that they do not regularly, often grievously, engage in just this kind of reflexivity. To be sure, most of the executives and creatives loved the adrenalin rush and the incomparable salaries that came with the job. But they would also regularly turn despondent about what some of them saw as a kind of gilded cage. The walls of this cage defined, ultimately, a relation of impotence: between the circumscribed and impoverished rationality of professional practice on the inside, and, beyond, the fearsomely complex public travels of the images themselves, for which no single set of actors could reasonably be expected to take full responsibility. No wonder that the outcome of the despondency was so often cynical anger, ironic detachment, or defensive boasting.